


Lost without You

by lonelywalker



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: F/M, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 04:09:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-<i>No Way Out II</i>. Frank and Jane live happily ever after... almost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost without You

Frank is twenty-seven years old when he first tries to kill Jane Hanratty.

There's always been a certain peace about the night, and the routine it holds: a syringe primed with tranquilizer in his hand, each of his tools sharp and clean and neatly arranged. His victims seem to simply fall into place, as if condemned by fate to meet their ends at his hands. Male and female. Young and old. He takes them all.

He is twenty-seven years old when he has her on his stainless-steel table, and she is beautiful. They're all fascinating in a way, as he watches the confusion turn to fear in their eyes, watches the hope drain away from their souls. They're all fascinating, but she smiles at him and says, "you have such beautiful eyes" in what can be no more than a whisper.

He'll be repeating those words over and over in his mind for the next thirty years.

Killing her is everything he wants, and everything he needs to satiate his desires. But, finding her unconscious once more, he searches her car, daring the local cops to find him, and discovers where she lives.

She's warm in his arms as he carries her home and tucks her into bed as though she’s nothing more than an over-tired child. He's sure she'll wake up and scream and fight and force him to do what he should have done long before – one movement of his scalpel and she'd be nothing but a flash of blood on a white wall.

But she sleeps. She sleeps even as he sits on the edge of her bed and watches her, runs his naked thumb over her cheek. In a fairytale he'd wake her with a kiss, and what then? He's never known love, but something in his stomach tightens at the thought, and there's a longing in him he knows won't be abated with blood.

It's the sheer confusion of it that makes him leave, and brings him back year after year. She never leaves the town. Never moves house, although for the first few years he expects it. Almost longs for it. If she would simply _go_ , perhaps he could let her drift out of his thoughts. But she stays, and he keeps coming back, watching her from afar, getting to know the community, acquiring a taste for the strawberry milkshake served at an otherwise unremarkable roadside diner.

At first, he can limit his thoughts of her to those few days a year he spends on the road, on the hunt, stringing together his parodies of romantic gifts. He's never wanted to be caught before, has lived most of his life in the childish elation of simply _knowing_ that he was too good at what he did for anyone to catch him. But he spends his evenings imagining that touch of a hand on his shoulder, that look of recognition. He imagines telling her his name. He imagines kissing her and taking her and having her forever.

The second time she sees him, thirty years from the night she was an innocent young girl and he was an equally naïve killer of a boy, she turns tail and runs.

Frank can't feel fear, but he can recognize it, and in Jane he sees only what he'd seen so many years ago – confusion and longing and need. And that's a feeling he can truly understand.

"I shouldn't have run," she tells him later, her hands warm around one of his, her fingers nervously tracing each one of his bones, every line of his knuckles. She's shivering, from anxiety he guesses, and empathy is hardly his strong point. "I didn't want to. I didn't… I wanted to…"

He's had thirty years to prepare what he might finally say to her, even though he'd never thought it would actually happen, and certainly not in the back of a cop car with a federal agent driving, listening to every word.

In the end, she's braver than he is, touching his face as he tries to frame a word. "I thought you were..." She laughs, self-conscious. "I thought you weren't human. I thought you were an alien."

And, finally, his smile matches hers – for once, unpracticed. "You wouldn't be the first," he says.

After that, kidnapped children and irate agents aside, he knows that everything will finally be all right.

***

He's a terrible actor, he tells her when they finally arrive at his home. He means to warn her. To show her why people, even in this remote area, find him a little strange. But he finds himself telling her about Manhattan, about his mother, about the little boy he was, dressed in a suit he'd grown out of far too quickly, trying to pretend to be a waiter without any concept of what a waiter might be. He's spent an entire lifetime not being himself to anyone, and in the span of forty-eight hours he's been nothing but honest, first to Jason Gideon, and now to Jane.

He's never felt this much relief without having blood on his hands.

And Jane… Jane accepts everything, exploring his house - _their_ house – and the grounds with childlike wonder, although he warns her not to stray into the woods. There are coyotes, sometimes, but mostly he doesn't want her to get lost. He watches her for a while, taking a little pride in the way she examines his tools so neatly laid out, turns over his work, strokes her fingers through sawdust.

"You're an artist," she says, her arms around his waist, drawing him close.

He almost flinches at the note of praise in her tone. "They're purely functional."

"They're beautiful. Really beautiful."

And this is who he'll be, he thinks, holding her tightly to him, closing his eyes and breathing in the scent of her. He'll be the man he's pretended to be, fifty or so weeks a year, every year since he left home.

They have fun. Frank hasn't had _fun_ – real, childish, stupidly happy fun – since one summer he slipped into the Long Island fair through a hole in the fence and watched, dazzled, as other children ran and laughed and paid absolutely no attention to the strange, silent boy who had barely seen the outside world before.

He tells Jane that his mother used to take him every weekend. Some wounds are just too old to reopen.

They go anywhere they want. He's used to traveling and, even without his trailer, he enjoys the countryside, the desert, the wide open spaces. He could have grown up an agoraphobic, terrified to leave the safety of the urban jungle. But instead he embraces it. After all, he's become the thing other people fear the most.

He shows Jane the natural wonders of a nation she's barely seen. He takes her to fine restaurants, teaches her how to dance, tells her all about Beethoven (he's not going to drop the love of a lifetime just because Gideon had taken a blind stab in the dark about that one). The FBI's ongoing search for him, even without his full name, makes marrying her inadvisable, but he wears a ring for her regardless. It feels good. It feels right.

Sometimes, driving on an almost-empty road, Jane happily asleep beside him, he'll feel it. A nagging itch, like a need for a cigarette or a cup of coffee. He's felt it before, over the years, and he's always easily given in. The animals he hunts for his work have helped to take the edge off, and the people are even easier to find - young men hitchhiking, middle-aged women puzzling over steaming engines.

It had been easier in the early days. He'd been unskilled and unsure, but the roads had been quieter and there had been no damn cellphones. Still, there's something that comes with age. He might have been a good-looking kid in his twenties, but he'd never been able to pull off a charade of normalcy. With time, he'd learned to smile without it seeming like a threat. He'd learned to make people relax.

Perhaps he's not such a bad actor after all.

***

Frank is fifty-eight when he tries to kill Jane for the second time.

It’s not personal.

He’d offered to take her to NYC for her birthday, tempting her – and himself – with Broadway shows, the Guggenheim, and a world of culture and entertainment. It might be easier to lay low in the middle of nowhere, where the only people within 50 miles are sure that he’s the most harmless man who ever lived, but it does get boring. He’d made plans, even had the plane tickets, but she’d said no. She only really wanted to be with him, to make up for the thirty years they’d been apart.

And that should have been fine. Instead, he’d found himself out in the woods looking for supplies, about ready to gnaw his knuckles down to the bone in frustration.

Perhaps Gideon is correct that he can’t feel fear. His extensive library of psychology journals would seem to agree, as would his entire life experience since at least puberty. But the idea that Gideon was right about the other thing, that his love for Jane isn’t love at all, that it’ll fade, that he’ll kill her too, that the _only_ way he can feel anything at all is by seeing utter terror in another person’s eyes… No. No, that won’t do at all.

It’s late when he comes home. Jane finds him in his workshop, washing the blood out from under his fingernails. He’d done his best to work away the longing desire radiating within him, to tire himself out in the woods, to take out his fury on every living thing he could find and catch. But this isn’t an addiction to nicotine that will lessen with each day, that will eventually be flushed out of his blood. It _is_ his blood.

Jane is sweet and good, and hurt when he snaps at her, when he pushes her comforting hands away. He wants her to run. To lock herself in their bedroom at the very least, so that he can have time to make these thoughts go away. But she’s far too good for that. He’s made her love him, and he knows it’s the worst thing he’s ever done.

It’s all so easy, doing what he’s done hundreds of times before. There’s no trailer, no autopsy table, but no one will disturb them here. They don’t even have a phone. If part of him wants to be stopped, wants her to escape, too much of him is delightfully happy filling the syringe, sliding it effortlessly into her neck, catching her before she falls to the floor. The relief surges through him, better than any orgasm, and he goes to get his tools.

In the end, it’s Gideon who stops him. Frank stands and looks at her on his workbench, hand tightly curled around a scalpel, her eyes steady on his. He’s given her too much of the drug to let her talk this time. It should be easy. He knows precisely how to do this quickly, to get it over with. He can bury her body before morning. He can…

He can _love_ her.

The first time he had audited psych courses and frequented university libraries in a desperate attempt to discover what he was, the term “sexual sadist” had come as a relief. Even “psychopath” was good. He was no longer a scared boy following instincts that seemed alien, but a real, documented personality type. He’d read the books, studied the interviews, and felt as though, for the very first time in his life, he wasn’t alone.

Psychopaths can’t love, but Gideon had said it himself: there are no absolutes when it comes to the human mind.

Frank puts down the scalpel.

She’s gone when he returns. Perhaps she’d thought he wasn’t coming back. He’d walked as far as he could before daybreak, soaked to the skin by the winter rain, and stayed away as long as he could, teeth chattering, before he was sure he could control himself.

Perhaps she hadn’t trusted him. The car is gone, and with it one of the plane tickets. He digests this information silently and takes a long hot shower before dressing and slowly eating some leftovers from the fridge.

He’ll have to walk into town. Catch a bus from there. Take a flight to New York. And then? Well, there’s only one person Jane knows on the East Coast. Only one person who knows him.

She’s scared and confused, and it’s all his fault. He’s let her down again. Jane. The love of his life. They’re lost without each other. So he’ll go and win her back. He’ll tear apart Jason Gideon and the FBI and the entire city to find her again.

And if that isn’t love, he doesn’t know what love is.


End file.
